Features

Killer Spinach

When industrial agriculture goes bad

Perhaps you, too, were slightly confused by the recent spinach debacle. We are unfortunately accustomed to hearing about Escherichia coli in ground beef and other meat products; after all, the bacteria live in
the digestive tract of the animals that become meat products. It is
reasonable enough, if distasteful, to connect the dots between cow
manure and beef. But how did E. coli get into bagged spinach?

The news might have been easier to understand if the organics-bashers
had been right in blaming the contaminated spinach on manure-fertilized
organic fields. Again, the dot-to-dot logic would not have been hard to
follow. The organics, however, have been exonerated and the blame laid
squarely at the feet – and on the fields – of conventional growers. It
seems that pastureland surrounding the two Salinas Valley fields where
the spinach was grown has been found to be contaminated with the same
strain of E. coli that caused the outbreak.

This raises two questions. First, how does contaminated water get onto
the fields? Second, how does the produce from four fields come to
infect more than 200 people, killing three, in 26 states and in one
Canadian province?

To answer the first question, we need to ask,
“How does the water come to be contaminated?” The answer lies in the
roots of the iconic American West, where cattle hold sway over almost
everything else. The answer may also be simple: cattle congregate in
streambeds, defecate in streambeds, and thereby contaminate streambeds.
This congregation also happens to severely degrade those streambeds and
the vital ecological processes, such as soil conservation and
biodiversity maintenance, linked to them. There is an alternative,
though equally simple, potential cause: huge industrial-scale cattle
operations create huge amounts of manure; that manure generally is
consolidated into huge piles; when it rains, the piles leach into
waterways. Whether the manure is concentrated in a feedlot or dispersed
throughout the range, E. coli accompanies it into the water.

So then, how does contaminated water get onto the fields? Most
irrigation water is pumped from aquifers, and the movement of water
through the soil serves to filter out contaminants such as bacteria.
For the irrigation water itself to be contaminated, it must have come
into contact with the bacteria after being pumped; in the recall of
Foxy lettuce mentioned below, irrigation water had been held in a pool
before being sprayed on the fields, and that is where the contamination
took place.

Another potential avenue of contamination is
flooding. The Salinas River, its tributaries, and its estuaries, have
fecal coliform bacteria levels significantly above legal limits; E. coli is one such fecal coliform bacterium. After last winter’s heavy rains,
some of that water may have flooded onto the fields, where the bacteria
can survive in the soil for four months or more. Other possibilities
for contamination include worker hygiene issues, such as lack of access
to sanitary toilets, or wild animals defecating or tracking tainted
soil into the field.

The second question, then: How did the
problem spread so far? As September’s spinach fiasco unfolded, news
stations reported with horror the climbing number of states affected,
referring to the “outbreak” as though the contaminant was spreading
from place to place in a manner outside of our control. On the
contrary, the outbreaks across North America were so widespread due to
a very sophisticated system of distribution that allows all of our food
to be grown by only one percent of our population. This system is
incredibly efficient at moving food grown in one place – say,
California’s Salinas Valley – to other places far away – such as
Wisconsin, Canada, or Taiwan.

The system that moves produce efficiently also moves pathogens, pesticide residues, and other contaminants.

The benefit of this system is that consumers have ready access to
products they might otherwise be without. Anyone who’s had a craving
for tomatoes in February, or for almost any produce in almost any city,
can appreciate this. The problem is that the system that moves produce
efficiently also moves pathogens, pesticide residues, and other
contaminants.

A single facility may package produce grown on
several farms, then ship it for sale under an array of brand names.
Once spinach is bagged, for example, it becomes a simple matter to slap
a label on that bag and send it off. Or to slap some forty different
labels on it, as the Natural Selection Foods processing plant did in
the recent spinach case, sending their product out under the names
Natural Selection Foods, Pride of San Juan, Earthbound Farm,
Bellissima, Dole, Rave Spinach, Emeril, Sysco, O Organic, Fresh Point,
River Ranch, Superior, Nature’s Basket, Pro-Mark, Compliments, Trader
Joe’s, Ready Pac, Jansal Valley, Cheney Brothers, D’Arrigo Brothers Co.
of New York, Green Harvest, Mann, Mills Family Farm, Premium Fresh,
Snoboy, The Farmer’s Market, Tanimura & Antle, President’s Choice,
Cross Valley, and Riverside Farms. And all this time you thought buying
from Earthbound Farms was different than buying from Dole.

Seventy-five percent of the nation’s greens are grown in California,
and seventy-five percent of those are grown in the Salinas Valley. This
is not the first time E. coli has
turned up in California’s salad greens, but the ninth in a decade. In
fact, the year has been full of such outbreaks. Just two weeks before
the spinach recall, Monterey Mushrooms recalled mushrooms in seven
east-coast states due to possible contamination with Listeria monocytogenes,
which can cause a variety of illnesses from severe diarrhea to
meningitis; Classic Salads of Salinas initiated a nationwide recall of
salad mix and baby spinach due to contamination with Salmonella in July. A week after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lifted restrictions on fresh spinach, Nunes Co. irrigation water tested positive for E. coli, prompting a recall of 8,500 cartons of Foxy brand lettuce. In October, fresh tomatoes were linked to a Salmonella outbreak that sickened over 180 people in 21 states and two Canadian provineces.

In 2005, the FDA issued a letter to “California firms that grow, pack,
process, or ship fresh and fresh-cut lettuce” that warned the industry
of its “serious concern with the continuing outbreaks of foodborne
illness associated with the consumption of fresh and fresh-cut lettuce
and other leafy greens.” In this letter the FDA “strongly encourages”
and “recommends” that the industry revise and strengthen its practices,
specifically in regards to E. coli O517:H7. The letter specifies also that leafy greens contaminated by
flooding are to be considered “adulterated” and should be “excluded
from the human food supply,” warning that the “FDA is investigating
regulatory options and will consider enforcement against firms and
farms that grow, pack, or process fresh lettuce and leafy greens under
such unsanitary conditions.” The FDA does not, however, have the power
to require that firms or farms test their produce, and FDA inspectors
often visit a given establishment only every few years.

The 2005
letter received little notice at the time, but in the wake of the
recent scandal, Natural Selection Foods has announced “an ambitious and
unprecedented program” to “prevent another outbreak like this from
occurring.” The program is modeled on the beef industry’s Hazard
Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system, and adopts a
“firewall” approach. This means testing each lot of greens before it
enters the packing facility, which Charles Sweat, COO of Natural Selection, says “will prevent anything like this E. coli-contaminated produce from ever entering our facilities.”

Sweat also stresses that “we do not consider food safety a competitive
advantage. We will make everything we learn available to everyone in
our industry. These are challenging steps and will be challenging to
implement, but they will be well worth the effort if we can prevent
another outbreak such as this and restore consumer confidence in
spinach and fresh cut produce.”

As the private sector tightens
its regulations, it is questionable whether government oversight is
strong enough, or organized enough, to guarantee the safety of the food
supply. Regulatory functions are shared between the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the FDA, with the USDA covering meat, dairy, and eggs and the FDA covering all other food. Within the FDA, the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) is in charge of recalls; within the USDA recalls are the job of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). Both agencies have jurisdiction only over food involved in
interstate commerce; in-state matters are handled by state governments.
In addition, the US EPA oversees pesticide and irrigation issues, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) deals with foodborne illnesses.

It is the CDC that maintains the “nationwide system of food-borne
disease surveillance” which allows illnesses in disparate locations to
be traced back to their single source. In response to a major E.coli
outbreak in 1993, the CDC and the Association of Public Health Laboratories developed PulseNet, a national network of health departments and government agencies that allows the prompt comparison of DNA “fingerprints” of pathogens from labs across the nation. This is the
system that allowed the rapid response time in the spinach case: there
was a three-week lag between the first people falling ill and a recall
of the affected spinach. While faster than would have been possible
without such a network, this system still allowed the deaths of three
people and the illnesses of more than 200.

As a result, many
people are arguing for a consolidation of governmental power into one
regulatory agency. Among those people are Tom Ridge, chief of Homeland
Security, and Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY), Hillary Clinton (D-NY),
and Richard Durbin (D-IL) who have proposed legislation to create a
Food Safety Administration with oversight and enforcement power that
combines – and surpasses – that of the FDA and the USDA.

When I
began to write this article, I envisioned it as a sort of literal
muck-raking exposé, taking the spinach event and tying it to the
national issue of food supply and distribution. I expected that some
other publications would make this same leap – grist.com, for instance, or Alternet – but not The Media. Not mainstream news. And certainly not the Salt Lake Tribune, the Denver Post, and the Houston Chronicle.

But all these newspapers, based in solidly conservative cities, have
printed articles connecting the outbreak to agribusiness. The Houston
Chronicle, in fact, ran three stories that link the spinach
contamination to a wider problem; two of these were Associated Press (AP) stories. The AP story entitled “Food Chain Vulnerable to
Outbreaks” (October 9, 2006) ran across the country, and was picked up
by publications ranging from the San Francisco Chronicle to Time magazine. The article suggested that increased regulation is necessary
to control a vast and centralized food supply. A few days later, the AP
ran “More consumers turning to local growers,” (October 16, 2006) which
addressed the other side of the argument: if big farms are more
susceptible to large-scale problems, buy from small, local farms
instead. They don’t need big governmental oversight, because they are
directly accountable to their customers.

When a bag of Dole
spinach causes an illness, it takes weeks just to trace the product to
the responsible field, and longer to figure out how it came to be
contaminated. Most cases of E. coli are never, in fact, conclusively traced back to a specific source. If
someone gets sick from a farmers’ market salad, however, the farmer is
there next week to question. The third Houston Chronicle article connects all the dots: from greenhouse gas emissions to local
economies to the simple matter of taste, drawing the conclusion that
the “recent spinach scare should make ‘locavores’ of us all.” (October
9, 2006)

Big business politics aside, that’s easy enough to say
in Texas, where food can be grown year-round (given enough water) – and
it’s so easy in California that “California cuisine” has become
synonymous with “fresh and local.” From spring through fall, spinach
can be grown in every state in the Union. But what about those tomatoes
in February? Or what about anything in February in Maine?

The
question now seems to be, how can we feed ourselves safely? Local,
organic produce is not available to everyone all year ’round, but
large-scale produce like bagged spinach is. If we are going to get our
food from factory farms, those farms need to be overseen and regulated.
That same regulation, however, is crippling to small farms trying to
sell locally. Can the government distinguish between the two? Such a
distinction has not been possible in the case of the meat industry.
Only meat butchered in USDA-approved slaughterhouses can be sold to the
public, which is important if fifty-thousand-head herds are being
slaughtered. It is a formidable obstacle to a small farmer if the
nearest approved slaughterhouse is a hundred miles away, and designed
for fifty-thousand-head herds.

If similar guidelines are enacted
for the produce industry – requiring produce to be processed only in
FDA-approved plants, for instance, and requiring daily inspections like
those in the meat-packing business – the industrial-scale food system
will undoubtedly be safer. The impact on the farmers’ markets is harder
to predict. The small farmers around Salinas Valley might be able to
take advantage of nearby facilities intended to serve the big
producers, but what about those already struggling in places without
existing facilities?

As our population grows, these questions can only
become more pressing, and the answers more complicated. How we get our
food is a fundamental issue in our lives, and the threats to what is
currently the safest food system in the world are likely to become more
serious. Fortunately, the increasing notice to food security issues
being paid by the mainstream press, the explosion of farmers’ markets
and Community Supported Agriculture programs suggest that the country
is beginning to take the issue seriously. In the meantime, some spinach
in a window box might help even those of us in the frozen north get
through the long cold days ahead.